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9/12/2012 @ 6:06PM10,213 views

Sex And The Six Thousand Dollar Smartphone: The Vertu Constellation

While Symbian is showing its age (to put it mildly), in the Constellation, the problem is mitigated to a great extent by the fact that you’re not so much fiddling with Symbian itself as using it as a point of entry for the almost unbelievable range of services, alliances and partnerships that owning a Vertu phone puts at your disposal.

The list is long. First and foremost, there’s the Vertu Concierge Service, accessed with a dedicated function button –the Concierge service connects you with a personal assistant who will do an initial consult to determine your needs and requisites, and can be basically called on to handle anything you’d ask a hotel concierge to do for you –travel arrangements, hotel or restaurant reservations, or whatever else you think you’d like a real, live person to help you with, 24 hours a day, in 8 different languages.

While it’s true that the Symbian OS doesn’t offer the cutting edge current apps many smartphone users want, to criticize the Constellation on this count is to miss the point. The whole idea behind the Constellation is simple: personal service is the ultimate killer app. Constellation offers up reports tailored to your location (it tracks you via the Location Aware functionality, presumably a GPS mapping back-end) about what’s hot in whatever city you happen to be in, and these aren’t random Yelp grabs; they’re updated by correspondents specially hired for the job on the basis of their knowledge of each city and its hotspots and high points; you even get advice on “. . . local greeting customs and advice on tipping.” Among other things you can do with your Constellation is take advantage of private clubs in various cities –I don’t know for sure if iOS6 or Android Jelly Bean let you take a business client to dinner at The St. James Club in Paris, but I’m betting the answer is no. The phone’s got an on-call sommelier, for God’s sake (Berry Brothers & Rudd, in the UK.)

And, if you really find yourself in trouble in this mad, bad world of ours and need help with a little more teeth than the Concierge you can call on the PSG application, which will put you in touch with Protector Services Group, a “security and risk management company specializing in Personal Security, Corporate Security, Travel Security, Intelligence Services (!) Asset Protection and Investigation Services” –which, I suppose, means that if you’re worried your wife is actually a stringer for the CIA who’s cheating on you, in the name of National Security, with a guy who made his billions moving knockoff Kalashnikovs and landmines to the global hot spot du jour, you’ve got a shoulder to cry on. There’s even a Panic Button which, if activated, makes the phone appear to be switched off, but broadcasts an SOS to PSG along with your location.

We all have our priorities, of course, but clearly the client for this phone is not the same person who makes buy/don’t buy smart phone decisions based on whether he or she can play Angry Birds HD.

This is all not to say there are not hiccups; the Constellation, for all its brains and beauty, is handicapped in some respects by Symbian; in particular social networking requires going through a social networking portal called Ovi which makes Facebook and Twitter updates a trifle more work than they should be. In general, though, the conceptual framework for the phone –that the OS is something that should work in the background, and whose job it is to not call attention to itself, but to provide access to a suite of world class, personalized and in-person services, means that mostly, you won’t care. That said, CEO Perry Oosting has been making non-specific hints about migrating to a new OS for some months now. Whether the new back end is Windows Phone or the latest flavor of Android, it’ll smooth out the (mostly minor) hiccups that relying on Symbian creates. In another way, though, it won’t matter. As I’ve said, the Vertu Constellation is a smartphone whose strength is the idea that the best apps are other humans. Siri is lovely and novel, but she, poor software agent, is only a pale shadow of what we really want: a person to talk to and help us out of a jam, and that’s where the Constellation shines brightest.

The Vertu Constellation starts at $5600.

PS –yes, you can buy blingy Vertu phones, encrusted with precious stones and metals. I’ve always kind of suspected, though, that a little bit of Frank Nuovo dies inside every time Vertu sells one of those; I can practically see him shaking his head in despair, mourning for the magpie tastes of undiscriminating humanity. Mourning all the way to the bank, but, you know, whatever. For my money the way to go with Vertu is with one of the clean, design-forward models that lets you see the lovely bones Nuovo builds for the Vertu handsets. The bejewelled stuff is undoubtedly imbued with a certain barbaric splendor but on another level it’s a little absurd, like someone thinking you can improve on a classic “Super Hudson” streamliner locomotive by covering it with rhinestones.

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